Factory life exposed in Machines
More than any critical acclaim, documentarian Rahul Jain is just pleased he managed to impress his father, he tells James Croot.
Rahul Jain’s movie career was nearly over before it started. Having spent three years filming a documentary set in a gigantic Indian textile factory, the California Institute of the Arts undergraduate faced losing his place in the programme unless he could find a way to pull it all together. To his amazement, he not only achieved that, but the resulting tale – Machines – has screened to critical acclaim around the globe.
‘‘A sombre, relevant piece of work,’’ wrote The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, while Village Voice‘s Aaron Hills described it as ‘‘both uncompromising and unforgettable’’.
All of those kind words, despite it being essentially a student film with no voiceover, no text inserts and no musical score.
Reflecting on Machines‘ seemingly unbelievable journey, as it prepares to debut on New Zealand screens on Sky’s Arts channel this weekend, Jain says he still remembers being ‘‘utterly depressed’’ about the project as he struggled to create something coherent from hundreds of hours of footage.
‘‘I had been given the ultimatum to make something or get kicked out and all I could think of was that I’d taken a lot of money from my school, my teachers and mostly my father, who really did not believe in the project.
‘‘I had no clue who I was making this for, who would watch a film like this, and that was making me decidedly depressed.’’
Fortunately, he had the support of one of his professors, Tom Henderson, who told Jain after he saw the raw footage that, ‘‘if you are able to transfer the way you feel the world into this film with the images you have acquired, you’d be doing something no-one has done before in the history of film’’.
‘‘That was kind of a marker for me, because really nobody besides him actually believed in the project. Every time I had tried to broach it with any other teacher, they would say, ‘you’re being too ambitious’, or ‘too vain and vague’.’’
Yes despite, rarely for a documentarian, keeping himself out of the frame and off the soundtrack, its clear Machines is very much a personal project for Jain. Born in New Delhi, he remembers his maternal grandfather owning a factory very like the Gujarat one showcased in the documentary.
‘‘I used to spend my summer there,’’ he told Variety magazine. ‘‘I’m sure the desire to recreate that experience of being a child might have been the catalyst that propelled me.’’
He also thought this would be the ideal way to highlight how poverty in places like India was very different from western countries like America. Often already in debt, his subjects work
12-hour shifts and are paid a pittance for their labour.
But having found his location thanks to connections with the factory owners, Jain was aware that his presence would be treated with apprehension and suspicion.
‘‘It was a privileged perspective and position, because everybody knew that I knew the owners in some capacity and that meant I could do anything. So, I kind of had to relinquish that, let it go and actively break it. I would say, ‘Hey I know that you know that I know the bosses, but it really doesn’t mean anything’. I had to actively convince them over and over again about what I was trying to do there and that I wouldn’t be in immediate contact with the bosses about what I was seeing in the factory. I was just there to do my thing – record and steal my images and leave.
‘‘As a film-maker, I didn’t really want to make any kind of environmental impression, but I also think the person whose image you’re using has a right to know that they are being made into an image.’’
He admits he transgressed that boundary by filming people sleeping in the factory. ‘‘Sometimes, they would wake up a little bit, or their friends would wake them up and say, ‘Dude, dude, you’re being filmed’, thinking that I was going to share the footage with the bosses, or I was going to rat on them.’’
In all, he made three ‘‘incursions’’ (as he calls them) to the factory with his director of photography, gathering more than
400 hours of footage, including 650 interviews. As Machines shows, the workers gradually opened up to him, with some not only detailing their own privations, but also the systemic problems (in one memorable interview a man looks nervously over his shoulder as he details why workers’ unions aren’t popular because ‘‘union leaders get killed’’).
‘‘Yes, the interviews kept on getting prolonged in their length and content,’’ Jain reveals. ‘‘I think when you are looking at these things, you really have to take your listening skills to another level. For me, I think one of the core qualities that really supports me in this endeavour, more than any other trait, would be that, deep down, I’m just simply a curious person – and curiousity can really guide you at times.’’
He admits that also applied to the editing process. ‘‘When I was given the ‘do or die’ ultimatum at my school, I was, at the same time, browsing the library for random inspiration. One of the things that really clicked for me was a book called Workers, by the photographer Sebastian Salgado [whose life and work was the subject of the 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth]. It literally hypnotised me, captivated me and paralysed my two eyes on the book. I couldn’t flip the page. I spent five whole days looking at this book. I stole it from my library and then I bought a copy – but because it was kind of out of print I had to pay a big fee – just so I could put the book under my pillow. Of course, I returned the library book because it was so expensive and I thought other kids also deserved to be inspired by work like that.
‘‘I think as an artist, the most any other art can do for you is that it can give you the permission to be yourself. It can tell you to go forth and create what you feel. That’s what this book did for me.’’
Describing Machines as being ‘‘written on the editing table’’, he says that was far and away the most difficult part of the creative process because while he could hide behind the camera while filming, ‘‘in editing you cannot hide from anybody’’.
‘‘You are confronting everything you have acquired and if you don’t bravely and confrontationally look at these things and their meaning to you, then you’re actually going to end up with a really s.. film. [That’s] because it’s not going to be honest.’’
That honesty, or frankness, is clearly important to Jain. He says while the film hasn’t yet screened in Gujarat, his ideal plan would be to rent 50 factory town cinemas and, ‘‘for one week play the film on loop’’. ‘‘Hopefully, people will go to watch it. They may well feel trivialised in the beginning, or say, ‘what the hell, we’re not going to watch this trash right after we’ve worked 48 hours in a factory like this – this is crazy’. And I can understand why they wouldn’t want to prolong their suffering by watching a film like this.
‘‘In hindsight, I think I can answer who this film is made for. People who have the time to go to the cinema, or turn on the TV, and look at these things that make them think, rather than something that makes them escape from their immediate environment.
‘‘I think the best thing any art can do is make you think. Maybe that can initiate a chain reaction, or topple down the first domino in the chain and the rest is really up to the audience. That’s why I deliberately used no names in the film and there is no plea to donate to some kind of an NGO [nongovernment organisation], because, really, I think that is foolhardy.’’
As for the critical acclaim and awards Machines has received so far, Jain says the real reason that makes him happy is that maybe it will result in people who might not normally watch a documentary, consider taking a look.
‘‘I think of somebody like my father. It took him five times to really understand what this was. He would never have seen a film like this had somebody who was not his son made it. Most of his friends have a similar aesthetic background – which is a lack of one. I believe he’s kind of proud of me, but I think he’s proud of me because of the recognition that the film is acquiring throughout the world.
‘‘I would have liked him to have been proud when I made the film, without it going anywhere, but of course that is me being young and idealistic and even a bit spoiled. That’s because you don’t get recognition in the way you want it, especially from the people who you love most. It comes in their own time and in their own way. I guess it takes the world for your family to realise who you really are.’’
❚ Machines debuts on Sky TV’s Sky Arts channel on Saturday at 8.30pm.